A Father for Philip Read Online Free PDF Page B

along with
Philip. He called Philip spoiled, which he was not. A crybaby, which he was
not. He frequently claimed that all the child needed was someone to teach him
to act like a man.
    “What three-and-a-half-year-old child
needs to act like a man?” Eleanor had asked indignantly.
    When Philip started kindergarten at the
age of five, Eleanor was left on her own all morning. Grant, who by then had the
hotel operating in such a manner that he could periodically leave it in the
capable hands of his managers, started trying to make her see him as more than
a casual friend.
    “Ellie,” he said, “you’ve got to give up
on the guy. If he had been going to come back, he’d have done it years ago.
It’s no good hanging onto the past. I’m here. And I want you.”
    She had to admit his kisses made her
feel warm and that a few mild twinges of what could be desires rose up when he
held her. She began accepting small gifts, lunch and dinner dates, and the odd
antiquing trek. It was easier to do so than to argue, but she would not accept
the ring he wanted to give her last Christmas.
    “I can’t, Grant. I’m married,” she
pointed out gently.
    “Then get unmarried!” he’d cried. “For
heaven’s sake, Ellie, neither of us is getting any younger. Grant was nearly
forty—she, twenty-six at the time. “And not only that, the kid needs a father.”
    “I can’t get unmarried,” she replied,
taking no notice of the rest of his speech. “If you’re talking of divorce, I
have no grounds.”
    “How about desertion?”
    “Not good enough for me. I don’t know
that I’ve been deserted. There could be any number of reasons David hasn’t come
back.”
    “Name one,” he’d challenged, his blue
eyes filled with anger.
    “Amnesia?”
    “Pfft!” he scoffed. “If he’s alive,
which I doubt, he’s made a new life for himself somewhere. You need to do the
same.”
    “I don’t choose to, Grant.” And that,
she knew, was the crux of the matter. She kept David alive in her heart, her mind,
because she chose to. Maybe if someone had come along and she’d felt more for
him than she did for Grant, she’d give up what she admitted privately was
surely a futile hope. But no one had..
    He rammed a blunt-fingered hand into his
blond hair, sending the usually firmly controlled waves into disarray. “Dammit,
I want to marry you, Ellie!” He shook her by the shoulders in his rage and
frustration. “Let the past go!”
    “I can’t marry you or anyone,” she
argued, wrenching herself out of his ungentle grasp, “while I have a husband.”
    “He’s dead.”
    “Maybe... But my heart tells me he’s
not. The law says I must wait seven years to be sure.” That law could be
overridden if there was adequate reason to believe in the demise of the missing
person, but she—again, she knew this was an arbitrary choice on her part—did
not want to ask for an exception.
    Grant ignored the part about the law and
pounced again, having heard the small element of doubt in her tone. “Oh, Ellie,
let your heart tell you to belong to me. Let me look after you. Nowadays most
couples aren’t married. We could just move in to—”
    “Grant!” She cut him off. “I don’t want
to move in with you. I don’t want you to move in with me. Even if I loved you
and I don’t think I do, not enough, anyway, I couldn’t do that. I have Philip
to think about. What kind of message would I be sending him morally, if I lived
with a man I wasn’t married to?”
    “It would be none of his business.”
    “None of his business? How can you say
that? He’s my child. He goes where I go. He lives where I live. I would not put
him into the position of having to explain his mother’s living arrangements to
his friends at school.”
    “Then we’ll send him away to school,”
Grant said carelessly. “I mean, if he starts to ask questions.”
    “That’s ridiculous!” Eleanor stared at
him in disbelief. “I will never send my son to live